Boland's Poetry



The wounds are terrible. The paint is old.
The cracks along the lips and on the cheeks
cannot be fixed. The cotton lawn is soiled.
The arms are ivory dissolved to wax.

Recall the Quadrille. Hum the waltz.
Promenade on the yacht-club terraces.
Put back the lamps in their copper holders,
the carriage wheels on the cobbled quays.

And recreate Easter in Dublin.
Booted officers. Their mistresses.
Sunlight criss-crossing College Green.
Steam hissing from the flanks of horses.

Here they are. Cradled and cleaned,
held close in the arms of their owners.
Their cold hands clasped by warm hands,
their faces memorized like perfect manners.

The altars are mannerly with linen.
The lilies are whiter than surplices.
The candles are burning and warning:
Rejoice, they whisper. After sacrifice.

Horse-chestnuts hold up their candles.
The Green is vivid with parasols.
Sunlight is pastel and windless.
The bar of the Shelbourne is full.

Laughter and gossip on the terraces.
Rumour and alarm at the barracks.
The Empire is summoning its officers.
The carriages are turning: they are turning back.

Past children walk with governesses,
Looking down, cossetting their dolls,
then looking up as the carriage passes,
the shadow chilling them. Twilight falls.

It is twilight in the dolls' museum. Shadows
remain on the parchment-coloured waists,
are bruises on the stitched cotton clothes,
are hidden on the dimples on the wrists.

The eyes are wide. They cannot address
the helplessness which has lingered in
the airless peace of each glass case:
to have survived. To have been stronger than

a moment. To be the hostages ignorance
takes from time and ornament from destiny. Both.
To be the present of the past. To infer the difference
with a terrible stare. But not feel it. And not know it.

When EB's family was young, they were living in Dundrum, south of Dublin. The Dolls Museum was a short drive away (now it's at Powerscourt), and EB would often take her children there. It was a "room with high glass cases crowded with dolls, you could see their faces, the old craft and art, before plastics."

What did these dolls mean in the era before plastics, which was also the era of nation-making in Ireland? These fast-moving historical events happened in the presence of deeply inert objects.

These "strange, almost ominous, inert emblems of childhood, and the idea of the Easter Rebellion and the way the children must have clasped those dolls in a history-less moment.

This is about where history is and is not recorded. The dolls do not feel or know anything; they're ignorant of the history they have witnessed, and instead have "the stupor that ensues from digesting a history and identity that is not one's own."





The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me.
It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate! How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.
The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world. But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it. As I have.
She will wake up. She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips. I will say nothing.

Fat and full of red juice and sweet, crunchy, ruby-red seeds bursting from it when it is split, the pomegranate has traditionally been a symbol of fertility, and, more recently, of female sexuality. It was considered an aphrodisiac and often presented at weddings. Ancient Sumerians believed that only after the souls of the dead ate pomegranate seeds in the underworld did they become immortal.

Persephone, Linoleum Block Print, by Miriam Sanders (2007)

The Greeks used the story of Demeter and Persephone to explain the changes in seasons. But it's also about the power of parental love, and what lengths a mother will go to to protect her child.

Demeter Mourning for Persephone, by Evelyn De Morgan (1906)

Boland's first experience of the myth is as the daughter and victim. She acknowledges being taken from all that she knew, all that she called home, and growing up in a strange place, exiled.

Hades and Persephone, by Matthew Kocvara (2014)

Now, however, she sees the other side, and is the one who will have to let go. She has moved from one heartbreak to another.





The linen map
hung from the wall.
The linen was shiny
and cracked in places.
The cracks were darkened by grime.
It was fastened to the classroom wall with
a wooden batten on
a triangle of knotted cotton.

The colours
were faded out
so the red of Empire---
the stain of absolute possession---
the mark once made from Kashmir
to the coast-barns of the Kent
coast south of us was
underwater coral.

Ireland was far away
and farther away
every year.
I was nearly an English child.
I could list the English kings.
I could name the famous battles.
I was learning to recognize
God's grace in history.

And the waters
of the Irish sea,
their shallow weave
and cross-grained blue green
had drained away
to the pale gaze
of a doll's china eyes---
a stare without recognition or memory.

We have no oracles,
no rocks or olive trees,
no sacred path to the temple
and no priestesses.
The teacher's voice had a London accent.
This was London. 1952.
It was Ancient History Class.
She put the tip
of the wooden
pointer on the map.

She tapped over ridges and dried-
out rivers and cities buried in
the sea and sea-scapes which
had once been land.
And stopped.
Remember this, children.

The Roman Empire was
the greatest Empire
ever known---
until our time of course---
while the Delphic Oracle
was reckoned to be
the exact centre
of the earth.

Suddenly
I wanted
to stand in front of it.
I wanted to trace over
and over the weave of my own country.
To read out names
I was close to forgetting.
Wicklow. Kilruddery. Dublin.

To ask
where exactly
was my old house?
Its brass One and Seven.
Its flight of granite steps.
Its lilac tree whose scent
stayed under your fingernails
for days.

For days—
she was saying — even months,
the ancients travelled
to the Oracle.
They brought sheep and killed them.
They brought questions about tillage and war.
They rarely left with more
than an ambiguous answer.

Given the nature of primary education in England in the 1950s, this is probably the type of map that Boland saw in her classroom. Everything from the coloration to the projection to the centering of the map itself promotes British primacy.

A world map from 1907. (click for a larger version)



But the specter of this map sits behind what Boland saw.

All areas of the world that were ever part of the British Empire. (click for a larger version)





In the worst hour of the worst season
     of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking – they were both waking – north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
     He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
     Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
     There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
     Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.

Throughout the west and southwest of Ireland, there are a hundreds of tracks and pathways crossing the hills and valleys in the most obscure places, all seemingly going from nowhere to nowhere. These are the Famine Roads.

The Burren, County Clare


From 1845 to 1852 Ireland experienced an Gorta Mór, or the Great Hunger, a famine so severe that it is considered the worst peacetime humanitarian crisis in Europe since the Black Death in the 14th century. The most severely affected areas were in the west and south of Ireland. During the Great Hunger, over 1 million people died and almost 2 million more left the country. Ireland was then part of the United Kingdom, but initial British attempts to relieve the famine in 1845 were halted in 1846 when the Whigs took over the government administration.

The famine roads were part of a project initially conceived by Robert Peel's Conservative government to improve infrastructure in Ireland and thereby strengthen the economy, while also providing paid employment for those without other means of sustenance following the failure of the potato crop in 1845. But the project was not executed well, and funding arrangements didn't always work out. British government officials thought that local landlords (themselves absentees who lived in England) were skimming money from the project.


Killary Harbor, County Galway


But all of this was moot by 1846, when Peel was forced to step down and Whig John Russell became Prime Minister. By October of 1846 it was clear that over 90% of the potato crop of Ireland was blighted, and famine conditions were growing worse. Russell set out his approach to the famine: "It must be thoroughly understood that we cannot feed the people. . . . We can at best keep down prices where there is no regular market and prevent established dealers from raising prices much beyond the fair price with ordinary profits." His policies focused on finding work rather than food for the famine victims, because he believed that private enterprises, not the government, should be responsible for providing food to those who could afford it. He also stressed that any costs for this relief project should be paid by the Irish, not the English.

Russell also insisted that Ireland continue to export grain to England. From 1843 to 1846, Ireland exported over over 2.73 million tons of grain to England. So while tens of thousands of people in Ireland starved to death or died of exposure in the winter of 1846, the country was still forced to export over half a million tons of grain to England.


Famine road above Killary Harbour. Though the road is now difficult to see in places on the land, its alignment is clear from the sea.


In August of 1846 Russell selected Charles Trevelyan to oversee the government relief program. But Trevelyan limited the food aid program, because, he claimed, food would be imported into Ireland once people had more money to spend after wages were being paid on public-works projects like the famine roads and urban workhouses. He stated that

The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson and that calamity must not be too mitigated [..] The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.

Beyond seeing this disaster as some sort of divine corrective for the Irish national character, he also saw the continuance of the famine as an opportunity. In a letter to Edward Twistleton he wrote,

We must not complain of what we really want to obtain. If small farmers go, and their landlords are reduced to sell portions of their estates to persons who will invest capital we shall at last arrive at something like a satisfactory settlement of the country.

The Doulough Valley, County Mayo


A lack of tools, the malnutrition of the workers, a spate of terrible weather in the winter of 1846 and the spring of 1847, the starvation wages (which could be as little as three pennies a day), delays in even those paltry payments, official suspicion that local officials were employing people who really didn't need to be on the project, the inability of the bureaucracy to keep track of all the projects and handle all the payment processes involved, and the fact that the schemes were not preventing the ever-increasing distress of the people, eventually led to their abandonment.


The Healy Pass, on the Beara Peninsula. It straddles the border between County Cork and County Kerry.